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You can write ugly code in any language. As someone else (I forgot who) put it: messy Python code looks clean, messy Perl just looks messy.

As the old saying goes, "You can write Fortran in any language." Both languages are great, and people can code either well. That said, Python encourages clean code, whereas Perl, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that it encourages messy code, at least does not discourage it either.

In other words, while the programmer's still at fault, IMHO Perl is the equivalent to putting an alcoholic in a bar while telling him to only drink soda, while Python puts the alcoholic into a brightly-colored candy store instead.

Won't buy that.

We have developed an IVR product, counting over million lines of code. The trainees of the project once trained in Perl and exposed to the coding style, have always picked up and maintained it on their own. Would approach us only for functional queries!

So, IF you are a programmer what did you do about it? If you did nothing, I blame you not Perl. It is never the fault of Perl that the code is bad it is the fault of the programmers.

While you may be able to do everything in Perl, it doesn't mean the you always should. While the Perl defenders will claim that it is always the fault of the programmer, which is true since the code isn't writing itself, it does not negate the fact that Perl is a language that lends itself particularly well to incomprehensible code. Certainly far more so than Ruby or Python.

But each to their own. There needs to be an appreciation of the applicability of differing programming languages to differing problems and environments. Perl has its place, along with its good and bad points, as do all other languages.